Looking Back: 5 Great Shows That Would’ve Been Even Better If The Writers’ Strike Never Happened

The 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike cost us two episodes of Breaking Bad. Also, for 100 days, thousands of talented writers behind our favorite shows were without jobs, but mostly: IT COST US TWO EPISODES OF BREAKING BAD. The A.V. Club recently took a look back at the strike’s influence on the show:

The story goes that Aaron Paul’s character on Breaking Bad was destined to meet a grisly end in the ninth episode of the first season. But the 2007 WGA strike got in the way, cutting off production at seven episodes (six of an intended eight after the pilot). In the intervening time between seasons, Vince Gilligan changed his mind…Though the story makes for great dinner-party fodder, it has been blown far out of proportion. Gilligan and the actors like to trump it up as a great joke on a panel, but the fact is that Gilligan and his writers knew that Paul was too good, and was becoming too integral a parallel to Walter White to be discarded as an emotionally significant loss to signal a paradigm shift in the protagonist’s story. (Via)

In other words, Gilligan knew he wasn’t going to kill Pinkman; the strike just confirmed it. Still, in a sense, Breaking Bad was greatly helped by the strike (which also lead to the creation of Childrens Hospital and Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog), but let’s take a look at some great shows that weren’t so lucky.

1. Battlestar Galactica

The anger people feel about the Lost finale is the rage I have for a lot of the final season of Battlestar Galactica. It’s rushed, confusing, and a major creative tumble for a show that was one of TV’s best. The strike is at least partially to blame. Season four’s “Sometimes a Great Notion” was the last episode turned in before the picketing, and because the writers knew there was a chance they might never return to the show, it was written as something of a series finale. (Edward James Olmos assumed as much, telling the cast and crew, “This is the end, I think we all feel that. They’re not going to bring the show back. They’ll pull the sets down. We’ll never shoot another episode.”) Other reports, however, claim “Revelations,” the episode preceding “Sometimes,” was the true too-early finale. Either way, the show would have gone out with a boom or a rotting Earth, and that’s not what creator Ronald D. Moore wanted. He claims the strike actually helped the show, giving the writers enough time to rewrite the final batch of episodes, but considering they did pretty well working on a normal production cycle, I’d disagree — the second half of season four, essentially a reset on everything that happened in the first half, feels pinched and overcooked. It’s like an unnecessary coda to a work that didn’t need further explanation.

2. Pushing Daisies

It was remarkable that Pushing Daisies even made it to air in the first place. When stripped down to its gooey, blueberry core, it was basically a show about a necrophiliac who makes pies. It was never going to be a massive hit, but the strike certainly did it no favors. A planned 22-episode first season was shortened to only 9, and by the second season premiere, it had been 10 months since the last new episode. Needless to say, ratings quickly plummeted after a promising start (nearly 13 million Chi McBride fans watched the pilot) and a gone-too-soon cult classic was born. Pushing Daisies wasn’t a show meant to last five, six seasons, but ABC should have at least given Bryan Fuller the time for a satisfying narrative conclusion. Oh well, they’re loss: NO HANNIBAL FOR THEM.

3. Saturday Night Live

Saturday TV Funhouse was always one of the more consistently great things about SNL in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Robert Smigel’s demented mind gave us the Ambiguously Gay Duo, “Ray of Light,” “The Religetables,” and a personal favorite, “Titey.” But after the Strike came and went, Lorne Michaels had to cut the show’s budget, and out went TV Funhouse. The rising popularity of the the Lonely Island’s Digital Shorts didn’t help, either.

4. Scrubs

With all due respect to Eliza Coupe, Scrubs should have ended long before it got to its ninth season. That was the plan, too; Bill Lawrence was ready to say goodbye to Sacred Heart after season seven, but you guessed it, the strike happened and only 11 episodes were aired. Scrubs hopped over to ABC in 2009, and largely sputtered until its emotionally devastating finale…and then it went on for another year. Combine seasons seven and eight into a 22-episode block and you’ve got something special. Instead, we got Dave Franco. Again, sorry, Eliza.

5. Life

Everything Dustin said, plus Garret Dillahunt as a Russian mobster. One show that was greatly improved by the strike:

That was NBC’s “Fox” period, where they kept starting and cancelling good shows because they didn’t understand how to market things properly, ala what Fox did to Arrested Development and Firefly. See also: Kings, Studio 60, etc.

My only trip to L.A. Ended up happening right before the strike and I was able to take a tour of the WB lot. I was the only One who said a show they wanted to visit so we visited the set of Pushing Daisies. I was able to see the Pie Shop up close.

I had a similar experience when I went through it. With every episode I watched, I assumed it was going to GET GOOD in the next one. But that never really happened. It was always just behind the corner around which it could be a good show.

I was going to comment and be like “well maybe Josh is like me and doesn’t acknowledge the existence of Season 2” and then I read your reply, went to page 2 and now this reply is more useless than it was already going to be.

Man the last 2 seasons of Scrubs on NBC were a pile. The ABC season really impressed me as its quality was up there with Seasons 2 and 3. I still don’t consider Scrubs: The New Class or whatever as a season of Scrubs since it was always intended to be a spin-off show.

I agree with everything you wrote about Scrubs, but I’d like to say that while it sputtered on ABC, the finale was far and away 1,000 times better than the original finale on NBC. A fairy tale themed episode? Terrible and offered no closure to the characters.

Writer’s strike or no writer’s strike, FNL’s second season would have still been awful. It’s not like it forced them to write the Landry Murders A Rapist plot or Street Goes To Mexico For Illegal Shark Blood Surgery plot. The network demanded more sensationalism, so that was the plan all along. The only thing that would have been improved was the abrupt end to the season. If anything, the writer’s strike helped the show in that it made it easier for the creator’s to just ditch most of the storylines in season 3 since they didn’t get a proper end in the first place. I bet if season 2 was a full 22 episode season that the show wouldn’t have rebounded the way it did.

AMEN. FNL was saved by the shortened season 2. If we had had the full thing we’d never recover from the ZOMG A MURDER storyline. EVER. Peter Berg came in and was like.. ‘WTF DID YOU PEOPLE DO WHILE I WAS AWAY’ Oh god.. poor pooor useless Santiago.

Season 2 of Friday night lights fits perfectly with my theory that Todd from breaking bad is just Landry cuz college didn’t work out for him. Also that shark thing in Mexico fixed hercs legs so he decided to sell meth with Landry in ABQ

While a lot of people are going to disagree with me on the “great” part, I’d add The Sarah Connor Chronicles to that list. The strike killed all the whacky Terminator-goes-to-High School hijinks they were building up, and while I thought the second season’s overall arc was great, it meandered badly in the middle.

Studio 60 was cancelled because it got super preachy about religion and didn’t focus enough on the show within a show (which was never funny). Sorkin wanted it to revolve too much around the entire network and not enough around the late night show.

Wait so Sorkins show got too preachy and decided to double down on boring people interacting with each other? Man… where have I seen this before… Side note am i missing anything on Newsroom? I havnt watched it at all this season.

I would argue that the writer’s strike helped Friday Night Lights, since it abruptly ended that terrible second season. There were virtually no storylines of relevance in it that were good. The only exception that comes to mind was Smash’s college recruiting. You could probably just skip that season entirely, and with a 30 second synopsis go strait into the 3rd season without missing a beat. The synopsis would just say, “Smash got hurt, Sarasan got dumped, Coach is back coaching, and Riggings/Lyla are still in high school even though they were supposed to be seniors two years ago.”

Totally agree on “Life.” The fact they had to get Charlie sprinting to the finish line on that first shorter season ramped everything up–I don’t think there is a single episode of any tv show I have watched more times than the first season ender of “Life!” I do mourn the fact that they stripped the awesome original music tracks out fro the DVD and streaming versions though–Gram Rabbit, John Doe, Yeah Yeah Yeahs…damn! The music on that show was close to as wonderful as it is on “Breaking Bad!”

In defence of Scrubs, Bill Lawrence has explicitly stated the last few seasons existed in order to serve the crew, who were struggling to find work in the mess around the writer’s strike – they had families, essentially, and would be pretty broke otherwise.

In that context, they were actually amazingly successful final seasons.

The worst stuff in 4 was the whole storyline with the new CTU heads daughter being suicidal. 24 was a show that really struggled finding interesting storylines for characters other than Jack Bauer. This started to become a bigger issue after the 3rd season when David Palmer was no longer a major character.

You say THE writer’s strike like the recent one was the only one. A really good example is the shitfest that was season 1-2 of Star Trek TNG, where they had to dust off unused 20-year old scripts, cross out “Nurse Chapel” and replace it with “Counselor Troi,” etc. Very nearly killed TNG in its infancy.